Best 12 quotes of Lorna Sage on MyQuotes

Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the the time. They played. THEY were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old.

He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that grapes on Whitchurch pavements on delivery day. Beer.

I'm not sure what the moral of the bathroom-stool story is. Perhaps this: it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends, because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies.

It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's double shaming - shaming to REMEMBER as well, to fee so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory.

I was well on the way to tacking together a sort of nature religion to make up fro Grandpa's defection, an apotheosis of the back of beyond, in which I was just another thinking thing, neuter, drab, camouflaged. There'd be sermons in stones, and books to read in the haybarn, for ever and ever. Amen.

Man and wife, realist and dreamer ... n truth they were more than one flesh, they had formed and sustained each other, they had ONE STORY between them and it wasn't at all easy for me or my brother to inhabit it.

More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse.

The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.

The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.

This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily - it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.

What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot. She stayed furious all the days of her life - so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife.